CLW has noticed with concern the deployment of congressional committees by the trial bar the same way state attorneys general have agreed to be used, in pursuit of private parties to help out tort litigation campaigns by political allies.
Government Accountability & Oversight Board Member Matt Hardin testified against the practice at a recent hearing held as part of this scheme, a metastasizing of the AGs abuse of subpoena power toward private financial and political ends.
CLW now sees the same U.S. House committee at it again, with a hearing scheduled for Wednesday that seems a rather transparent effort to help the public relations machine in a flagging #ExxonKnew case (already last week we saw Massachusetts AG Maura Healey’s effort to help out her New York colleague, “a politically motivated attempt to gain media attention and distract the company just days before it is set to go to trial for a similar case in New York” as Energy in Depth posted out).
Trotting out activists Naomi Oreskes and Sharon Bordas is something of an effort to get the band back together from the “secret meeting at Harvard”, the sordid “delegitimize” meeting, and infamous La Jolla gathering calling for “a single sympathetic attorney general or even district attorney” to help the plaintiffs out. (Documents obtained from the latter revealed the long-ago scripting of 2019’s spectacle of “world-wide youth marches” scripted for the movement.).
A U.S. District Court described that Oreskes-Bordas, La Jolla-launched pursuit of AG investigations of perceived opponents of a shared agenda as one of the “‘strategies to win access to internal documents’ of fossil fuel companies”.
AS such, for some context CLW offers readers the above linked items, and its compilation of Oreskes’ and Bordas’ contributions to the climate litigation industry.